Full disclosure

[Michael Lohmann <mi.al.lohmann@gmail.com>]

Hi Christian!

Yes: I agree that the current state of the last submitted patch in that
discussion is far from optimal.
After Jeff Kings explanation I had a much better understanding for the
situation and the reasoning (and his suggestion was definitely better than
mine).

I had already prepared a new version which tackled (I think) pretty much all of
the criticisms. But then the above mentioned message came in and when I read
this:

> [...] they are trying to be different for the sake of being different, which
> is not a good sign.  I'd want our contributors to be original where being
> original matters more.

I am reading:

1) I am "trying to be different for the sake of being different"
2) Contributors like this are not wanted

So yes, I do understand this as a general statement on me as a contributor
without any proposal for me at least to explain the situation from my side.

I teach my colleges not to name variables with how they are initialized, but
with what information they actually convey and I found the "_NONE" one at least
misleading in its name.

So in the initial discussion I was a bit stubborn, because Philip wrote "I
don't have a strong opinion" and from my perspective the only argument was
"over there we also do it that way" (which _can_ 100% be a valid reason), but
Junio C Hamano did not even acknowledge my criticisms of the other the variable
name. I am totally fine with a decision like this if done consciously, but if I
don't even get an acknowledgement, let alone an explanation, my demands I place
on my code quality are that I write the best code I can. And with all the info
I had (prior to Jeffs message) I did still favour my first suggestion.

In my eyes it would be helpful to at least tell me what your (in my eyes not
obvious) preferences are on naming things, because otherwise I will rather
stick to my standards than blindly follow a single instance of other code where
I don't even know if that was a concious decision or it just happened by
accident.

So no, I don't agree with the assessment of point 1), but I still read the
message like that. I will accept it and instead use my skills in different
projects where they are indeed valued.

Cheers
Michael